The present study examines whether the Preston curve reflects a causal impact of income on longevity or, for example, factors correlated with both income and life expectancy. In order to understand the Preston curve better, we develop a model of optimal intertemporal consumption in which the...

It is often conjectured that higher life expectancy leads to longer schooling. The reasoning behind this notion is that a longer lifespan increases the recovery period of human capital investment and thus, makes it more profitable to invest in education. This notion goes back to Ben-Porath...

We develop a life cycle model featuring an optimal retirement decision in the presence of physiological aging. In modeling the aging process we draw on recent advances within the fields of biology and medicine. In the model individuals decide on optimal consumption during life, the age of...

I show that conventional estimators based on the consumption Euler equation, intensively used in studies of intertemporal consumption behavior, produce biased estimates of the effect of children on consumption if potentially binding credit constraints are ignored. As a more constructive...

Wives are typically younger than their husbands and women typically live longer than men. These two facts mean that for a typical married couple, wives have more incentive to save for old age than do husbands. This paper presents a theoretical model of the determination of household saving and...

In the present paper general stationary overlapping generations economies with many commodities in every period and many different consumers in every generation are considered. A government maximizes an utilitarian social welfare function, that is the sum of weighted averages of utilities for...

This paper contributes to the understanding of stochastic economic dynamics with S-shaped law of motion. Applying random dynamical systems theory, we obtain a complete analysis of a stochastic OLG growth model. In the long-run the economy converges either to a state with no capital (poverty...

In this survey, we review the recent theoretical and empirical literature on household saving and consumption. The discussion is structured around a list of motives for saving and how well the standard theory captures these motives. We show that almost all of the motives for saving that have...

Recent experimental studies suggest that risk aversion is negatively related to cognitive ability. In this paper we report evidence that this relation might be spurious. We recruit a large subject pool drawn from the general Danish population for our experiment. By presenting subjects with...

We study risk taking on behalf of others,both with and without potential losses. A large-scale incentivized experiment is conducted with subjects randomly drawn from the Danish population. On average, decision makers take the same risks for other people as for themselves when losses are...